Peacock Feathers Shawl

Finally! Completion is here! After a couple of months of gathering dust under the couch, my Peacock Feathers Shawl was resurrected and completed with gusto. And here it is:

What was it doing under the couch for so long? Nope, I didn't get bored or frustrated with it...this one turned into another story from Steffi's file of 'ran out of yarn' projects. Remember what happened with the Hemlock Ring Blanket? With just 1/8 of the cast off edge to go, I was left looking at my yarnless hands. This time, though, the yarn trailed off waaaaaay before the finish line. D'oh!

The original pattern called for approximately 110gm of Zephyr 2/18, which is a yarn that I used to make the Frost Flowers and Leaves. I had 200gr of a similar weight yarn from Norway, purchased on holiday there (thanks mum!) and figured that would be enough.

WRONG!

To make a long story short, the yarn factory apparently sent me an extra hank of yarn which never arrived (Merry Christmas to whoever got the package), so I enlisted the help of a lovely Norwegian lady from Ravelry, who very kindly took a trip to her local yarn barn to find the same yarn in seemingly the same dyelot, too. Cheers, Gaupe! We did a yarn swap and I sent her some of my favourite Finnish yarn in a deep turquoise colour. Turns out that I needed quite a lot of extra yarn - about 25 grams.

Pattern: Peacock Feathers Shawl
Designer: Dorothy Siemens
Source: Fiddlesticks Knitting
Finished Measurements: HUGE. 240cm wide and 110cm deep
Needles: 3.5mm bamboo circulars
Crochet Hook: 3.5mm addi
Yarn Details:

• Røros Tweed Brodergarn
• 100% pure new wool from the Spælsau sheep
• colour #351
• 225 grams used
  

The yarn label doesn't give any extra details about the yarn and so I don't know how many metres on hank contains, but it looks to me to be a lace weight or possibly light fingering weight yarn.

This pattern is extremely well-written and the charts are ridiculously clear, which is what I expected for a pattern that costs $12. I would rate it as an intermediate level, mainly because of the third patterend section, where it is quite tricky to 'read' the lace and judge whether you've made a boo-boo (or even if you're in the right spot).

Blocking this was an affair in itself, as our floor rug at home wasn't wide enough to accommodate this shawl's tremendous wingspan. So I blocked the centre first and then did the tips separately later. Then, how to take pictures of this whopper? The only way I could manage to take a picture of the whole thing whilst in the house was to hang it up as a curtain, but after waiting impatiently for several days for the clouds and drizzle to clear, I headed down to the river to capture the great colour contrasts happening now during 'ruska', as is said in Finnish.

This is a good example of "All's Well That Ends Well", isn't it?